GOOD: PLANT GEOGRAPHY 759 



of these books take, at least as a partial basis, the theory of tolerance, published 

 in 1931, by the author of the last of them in an attempt to integrate into some 

 generally applicable working hypothesis of plant geography the many "factors 

 of distribution." 



Returning now to a more general consideration of the interwar years we find 

 that the literature of plant geography is so extensive that it is difficult to select 

 from it, though several broad features demand comment. One of these is the 

 special attention given, notably by German workers, to the more detailed study 

 and analysis of types of distribution area, or areography as it has come to be 

 called, a subject to which Hannig and Winkler's new serial publication Die 

 Pflanzenareale, founded in 1926, contributed much and of which there have been 

 various minor reflections in more recent years. Another noteworthy and valuable 

 feature of this period was the large number of memoirs written about various 

 phytogeographically strategic parts of the world by authors fully conversant 

 with their floras. Anything like an exhaustive list would be much too long here, 

 but they may be exemplified by the work of several authors : Allan and Oliver 

 for New Zealand; Bews for South Africa; Perrier de la Batliie for Madagascar; 

 Gleason for the mountains of southern Venezuela; Guillaumin and others for 

 New Caledonia; Setchell and many others for various parts of the Pacific; Scotts- 

 berg and St. John for Hawaii; Skottsberg for Juan Fernandez; Lam and van 

 Steenis for parts of Malaysia; Merrill for the Philippines, and Hulten for the 

 region of the Bering Strait. 



With all this went many advances in cognate subjects, as, for instance, the 

 study of angiosperm fossil floras in which the work of Berry and, rather later, 

 Chancy was notable, but for the rest it must suffice to mention, as representative 

 of many others, three books which, though very different from one another, 

 nevertheless each added something of worth to the general store. The first of 

 these, in order of appearance, was Marcel Hardy's little book The Geography of 

 Plants (1925), the uninspired title of which may well have served to obscure 

 its very real merit as one of the few really concise and readable general accounts 

 of world vegetation as a whole. The second is the volume of essays published in 

 honor of W. A. Setchell (Goodspeed, ed., 1930) in which a number of eminent 

 phytogeographers give authoritative accounts of their own special interests. The 

 third is Ridley's great book The Dispersal of Plants Throughout the World 

 (1930), in which there is surely gathered together all that is known, or at least 

 was known at that time, about this peculiarly bewildering subject. Probably no 

 other branch of plant geography has been so misunderstood, and even so much 

 misrepresented, as this, and Ridley, although he confines himself largely to the 

 recording of facts, at least provides some kind of sheet anchor, so that the subject 

 may be more safely approached. 



Of the years since the outbreak of the second World War not much can be 

 said here. They are too close to allow us to generalize and it can only be said 

 that the literature is still copious and shows no sign of abatement. One or two 

 items of this period have already been referred to and to these a few others 

 must be added. Two publications of the actual war years testify to the continued 

 vitality of what has been called here the German school, namely, three papers by 

 Vester (e.g., 1940), in which he summarizes, with the help of small maps, the 

 distributions of all the families of angiosperms, and Meusel's book Vergleichende 



